The Austrian film-maker Ulrich Seidl is best known in this country for his 2007 film Import/Export, an impressive, depressing account of parallel lives in Austria and the Ukraine. Olga, a Ukrainian nurse, leaves her little daughter to find a better life in Vienna, but ends up as a cleaner in a run-down geriatric hospital. Meanwhile Paul, a working-class Austrian, loses his job with a security firm and leaves with his alcoholic father to sell secondhand fruit machines in the Ukraine.

Seidl has followed this diptych about social and spiritual poverty, disappointment and self-deception with a trilogy on the same themes, ironically called Paradise. In the first film, Love, the overweight, middle-aged Viennese divorcee, Teresa, leaves her teenage daughter with her sister to spend the summer as a sex tourist in Kenya. She experiences brief sexual satisfaction with young male prostitutes she meets on the beach before becoming disgusted with these commercial transactions and ending empty and alone. It's a revealing, often bitterly funny study in embarrassment and disillusion. Paradise: Faith centres on Teresa's sister, Anna Maria, a hospital technician and religious fanatic separated from her crippled Muslim husband. She spends her holiday flagellating before a crucifix and trying to get people to join her in bringing Austria back to fervent Catholicism.

The trilogy is completed by Paradise: Hope that begins the same summer with Anna Maria dropping Teresa's lovable plump 13-year-old daughter Melanie at a "Dietcamp" for overweight, middle-class children. In a coolly observed film she forms a close friendship with a more experienced girl, and the two drink, smoke and have a wild time. She also develops a crush on a handsome doctor some 40 years her senior, and due to his inept handling of the situation this finishes up somewhere between inappropriate and actionable. All three films end in tears of different degrees of bitterness and have about them a doomy ring of truth. Like Import/Export, they're crisply co-photographed by the Austrian Wolfgang Thaler and the American Ed Lachman, whose numerous collaborators include Altman, Wenders, Schrader and Soderbergh.